Are either of these book titles familiar: Hitlerism in the Highlands? Ju-Ju and Justice in Nigeria? Not ringing any bells so far? How about A Drug-Taker’s Notes? No, me neither. Even the most discerning of Wigtown’s innumerable bibliophiles won’t have come across the majority of titles championed by the Random Book Club, and that is exactly how the creator of the project, Shaun Bythell, likes it.

Bythell bought Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop 14 years ago and maintains an unwavering belief in the joys of browsing, of stumbling across a hidden gem, of entering a bookshop with a specific title in mind and leaving with a pile of obscurities you had never imagined existed. Amazon may be merrily slashing their prices ever lower but the online experience of buying books remains anaemic. Bythell decided therefore to bring the delights of a bricks-and-mortar bookshop to an online audience.

The idea is simple: you sign up to the Random Book Club and each month Bythell will choose a rare oddity from the 100,000 books he keeps on his shelves and post it directly to your door. The choices are selected with a healthy dose of humour and are often positioned at the more absurd end of left-field, but they are sure to challenge your tastes and force you to re-evaluate your reading habits.

“Amazon’s Achilles’ heel is that browsing is not an option,” Bythell tells me. “To buy a book online you pretty much need to know its title. In a bookshop you will stumble across wonderful books which you never even knew existed.

“In essence, the Random Book Club offers this service, but delivered to your door. It’s bringing the serendipity of being in a bookshop to your doorstep. The Random Book Club neatly circumvents the mechanical dullness of buying online and, hopefully, delivers something you never even knew you were interested in.”

The Wigtown Book Festival concludes tomorrow but, for those of us not fortunate enough to live within a stone’s throw of Bythell’s shop, the Random Book Club is one way of taking the culture of this delightful place home with you.

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My first experience of foraging for local delicacies along Wigtown’s lanes and hedgerows was as bleak and wild as I'd hoped. The weather on Scotland’s south-western peninsula had turned vindictive and the wind whipped across the Salt Marsh pilfering the tweed caps of my fellow foragers and screaming at us all to get back inside. "Decent advice," I thought, and made noises about waiting for a break in the weather. Not likely - our expert guide Mark Williams described it as “a perfect day for foraging” and set off, braced against the elements, determined to track down a feast for us all.

Foraging has exploded in popularity recently, with many top chefs incorporating foraged ingredients into their dishes, including Danish restaurant Noma, three times annointed the world's best restaurant. If Williams’s nettle and dock leaf sushi failed to convince me of its merits, however, his ginger cake that he had brought along (naturally made with foraged ingredients) to keep morale high was a triumph. We found any number of varieties of berries, ground elder, nipplewort – don’t eat that one, I think he said – and a type of mushroom that was only safe to eat if alcohol had not been consumed within the previous 48 hours. “Sadly I have never had the chance to try it,” laughed Williams. Despite the cold, we were all warming to the task but I can’t deny that I was quite looking forward to foraging the local cafes for a late lunch.

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Wigtown Book Festival director Adrian Turpin told me an amusing story about a literary conference he had attended where he had jokingly titled his talk: "How not to run a book festival. A local journalist, however, failed to detect the irony and Turpin awoke the following morning to some unfortunate headlines about Scotland’s second largest book festival.

I left Wigtown yesterday after a wonderful week that has taken in a night in a bookshop, a talent show of unique charm, the hardest pub quiz I have ever encountered, something called English whisky and any number of fascinating, insightful talks. The locals were all glad to welcome the thousands of visitors who invade their town every year to enjoy this superbly organised event - many of whom will be back next year. Make no mistake, this is exactly how to run a book festival.